Storytelling for Sustainability in Higher Education

An Educator's Handbook

Petra Molthan-Hill, Heather Luna, Tony Wall, Helen Puntha, Denise Baden, Petra Molthan-Hill, Heather Luna, Tony Wall, Helen Puntha, Denise Baden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000763218
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

To be a storyteller is an incredible position from which to influence hearts and minds, and each one of us has the capacity to utilise storytelling for a sustainable future. This book offers unique and powerful insights into how stories and storytelling can be utilised within higher education to support sustainability literacy. Stories can shape our perspective of the world around us and how we interact with it, and this is where storytelling becomes a useful tool for facilitating understanding of sustainability concepts which tend to be complex and multifaceted.

The craft of storytelling is as old as time and has influenced human experience throughout the ages. The conscious use of storytelling in higher education is likewise not new, although less prevalent in certain academic disciplines; what this book offers is the opportunity to delve into the concept of storytelling as an educational tool regardless of and beyond the boundaries of subject area.

Written by academics and storytellers, the book is based on the authors' own experiences of using stories within teaching, from a story of "the Ecology of Law" to the exploration of sustainability in accounting and finance via contemporary cinema. Practical advice in each chapter ensures that ideas may be put into practice with ease.

In addition to examples from the classroom, the book also explores wider uses of storytelling for communication and sense-making and ways of assessing student storytelling work. It also offers fascinating research insights, for example in addressing the question of whether positive utopian stories relating to climate change will have a stronger impact on changing the behaviour of readers than will dystopian stories.

Everyone working as an educator should fi nd some inspiration here for their own practice; on using storytelling and stories to co-design positive futures together with our students.

1 Introduction

Petra Molthan-Hill, Tony Wall, Helen Puntha and Denise Baden

Storytelling has been rediscovered within higher education as an effective pedagogical tool to facilitate conceptual understanding within and across academic disciplines. It continues to gain traction as interesting projects are launched and research is undertaken to evaluate the impact of storytelling on engagement and knowledge retention. Some such fascinating insights and projects are presented in this book alongside stories targeted towards a range of academic disciplines from chemistry and engineering right through to business and law.

Written by academics and storytellers, the book is based on the authors’ own experiences of using stories within teaching and it offers educators—for the most part, university lecturers—a plethora of ideas and techniques to use storytelling within their own practice to facilitate understanding of sustainability and sustainable development. There is practical guidance to ensure that ideas may be applied with ease including suggestions and examples of how to assess student story work. The book also probes into how storytelling fits within the wider realm of general rhetoric and examines the research evidence including the question of whether stories with a positive outlook on climate change are likely to have a higher impact on behavioural change compared to stories which use dystopian scenarios. Researchers looking to specialise in this area could use the book as a starting point to identify gaps and to shape their own research.

For the purposes of this book, storytelling includes short and long stories, as well as poems, films and blogs. One author argues that annual reports are also stories told by companies (see Chapter 23 about storytelling and accounting). Such stories might be based on historical fictional or non-fictional events or may be ‘brand new’ stories designed to re-envision a world. They are, for the most part, stories which enable learners to express their thoughts and feelings about the world—and their place in it. Since the beginning of humankind, humans have lived their stories. Stories have provided a way to condense knowledge and practical experience; as well as to communicate world-views. Stories have aided humans throughout many centuries to describe problems and seek solutions, to object against the status quo and to express wonder at life’s blissful encounters; stories have provided refuge, solidarity and solace. Perhaps above all, stories have educated, if we consider the root of the word as educe, to draw out what lies latent within us. It is in this context, that the stories and chapters of this book are targeted towards the co-creation of a positive future for individuals and their societies—storytelling for sustainability!

Sustainability and sustainable development

The term sustainability has been criticised for being so broad and all-encompassing as to be nebulous, not only from an individual recycling a soft drink bottle to building country-wide waste-recycling energy plants (Lankoski, 2016; Pope, Bond, Hugé, & Morrison-Saunders, 2017) but also from very specific human rights issues to climate change, therefore encompassing social, environmental and economic issues on every scale (Salas-Zapata & Ortiz-Muñoz, 2019). Some believe that the term is akin to a fuzzy concept which is both inclusive and flexible and that therein, in fact, lies its usefulness (MacGillivray & Franklin, 2015; Wall, Clough, Österlind, & Hindley, 2019). Within this context, it can be helpful to paint a picture of a landscape which includes diverse ways to understand sustainability, since the reality is that sustainability has many facets (ibid.). Some may not tackle sustainability as broad and multidimensional and may instead conceptualise it as something much more specific and grounded. Many authors in this book, for example, cast sustainability as “climate change” and point to common media characterisations which are catastrophic and high threat (see Rachel Howell’s “The Storyteller Who Wanted to Change the World”, Nikhil Chandavarkar’s “Storying the Past: Using Historical Fiction to Teach Sustainability” and Chris Riedy’s “Storying the Future: Storytelling as Transformative Practice”). Although narrow, this allows a depth of exploration into these individual facets of sustainability and offers a way to make sustainability more tangible as a concept.

Some chapters, such as Grian A. Cutanda’s “Changing World-views through a Stories Collection and the Earth Charter”, bypass the need for a specific definition of sustainability altogether and instead characterise it in a broader sense; in the case of Cutanda, as “a systemic view of interdependence between all living beings and elements of the Earth, urging a shared responsibility for the good of all humanity, the community of life on the planet, and future generations”.

Others utilise sustainability as a normative idea from which to evaluate the worth of ideas, thoughts or actions. In “Storytelling for Sustainability: A Definition and its Implications for Education and Communication”, Daniel Fischer, Hanna Selm, Anna Sundermann and Martin Storksdieck explain: “Sustainable development is a concept that highlights the dynamic interaction processes of natural and social systems while focusing on intergenerational justice… . It is a normative concept: Not only does it describe these interactions, but it suggests interventions that enable the long-term functioning of natural systems while simultaneously addressing human needs.”

Then there are other interpretations, such as in Uthpala Sankalpani’s “How to Tell Stories” chapter, where the notion of sustainability is not directly explicated but implied through reference to stories which speak to the topic of ‘greener lifestyles’. Less tangible approaches to sustainability may appear problematic, but they can also be recognised as a type of flexible pedagogy which enables and includes the audience in co-constructing the ‘thing’ which is being referenced (Wall & Perrin, 2015; Wall, 2016). In other words, learners are empowered to conjure new ideas through their imagination (Wall et al., 2019); this can be a particularly helpful practice in which students are being asked to explore the feasibility of certain solutions or to envision different versions of the future.

Several chapters in this book have framed sustainability within the context of the United Nations’ Sustainability Development Goals (SDGs) or ‘Global Goals’ and we turn to these in more detail now. The SDGs are a set of 17 global goals which replaced the Millennium Development Goals as of September 2015. Most countries in the world have pledged to work towards achieving the goals by 2030. The overall aim of the SDGs is to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all while addressing each of the following:

1. 1 No poverty
2. 2 Zero hunger
3. 3 Good health and well-being
4. 4 Quality education
5. 5 Gender equality
6. 6 Clean water and sanitation
7. 7 Affordable and clean energy
8. 8 Decent work and economic growth
9. 9 Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
10. 10 Reducing inequality
11. 11 Sustainable cities and communities
12. 12 Responsible consumption and production
13. 13 Climate action
14. 14 Life below water
15. 15 Life on land
16. 16 Peace, justice, and strong institutions
17. 17 Partnerships for the goals

Every goal has a string of associated targets and indicators for achievement by 2030. In the context of storytelling, the goals provide the educator with a framework for communicating many of the challenges of our world through story whilst offering a structure by which to consider potential solutions. More information about the goals can be found on the United Nations website: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/sdgs.

The power of a story

The teaching of sustainability, as well as public discourse on the subject, is often dominated by facts and figures. So, a common approach would be to teach that “despite having a job, 8 per cent of the world’s workers and their families still lived in extreme poverty in 2018” (United Nations, 2019). Also, that approximately one in nine of the world’s citizens (821 million people) were undernourished in 2017 (ibid). This figure continues to rise and in 2018 included some 49 million children younger than 5 who were affected by wasting (ibid), a strong predictor of infant mortality. The global mortality rate for under-5s decreased from 9.8 million in 2000 to 5.4 million in 2017, yet most of the under-5 deaths which did occur were from preventable causes (ibid). In 2017, 262 million citizens aged 6 to 17 were out of school, with half of all children and adolescents not reaching minimum proficiency in reading and mathematics (ibid). Seven hundred fifty million adults were illiterate in 2016, and two thirds of these were women (ibid).

The following story personifies these statistics and is an autobiographical account from one of the editors of this book:

As a student I was working for four months in two slums (favelas) in Brazil. There I met a woman who made a very strong impression on me. She was incredibly poor, yet she had a strong sense of dignity. Once she invited me to her hut. The ‘sofas’ were old doors she had found somewhere, she would not take any presents; when she invited me over she bought one spoon of coffee so that she could make me a coffee as their visitor (a very odd experience to be sat with seven people who do not have a coffee in their hand).

She had taught herself reading and would often try to find books in the rubbish as she loved to read. She would also retrieve newspapers from the bins so that she could be informed about political matters. One time, she said to me that her heart went out to us in Germany when Germany was reunited (it was shortly after the wall came down in Berlin); this she had learnt from a newspaper placed in the rubbish. She was well informed, and she loved to learn more.

She had worked hard to give all her six children primary education and decided that the brightest would get [a] secondary education, whether boy or girl. This was her 12-year-old daughter; I have a beautiful poem from her (the child), where she accused the president of not looking after his people and asking him why she always has to be hungry (I was there during election time and Lula lost—as information for anyone interested in Brazilian politics). This girl and the other children had to work during the day to finance her education; in the evening she and the younger kids would go to school.

Sadly, the daughter passed away only two years later. I received a letter from her mum telling me about it and that her daughter had spoken about me in her final hours. I felt and still feel (it came back to me this morning as I was writing this) horrible. Could I have given her money to get medical help to save her? Yet I was far away in Germany and not aware that she had become ill. At the end, was it the system that killed her? At that time getting medical help as a poor person was not easy.

From this account of the woman’s story, it should be clear that storytelling in the context of sustainable development can supplement in a very powerful way, the facts which might otherwise form the core of teaching activities. Stories allow for a greater ‘stickiness’ because they “allow a person to feel and see the information, as well as factually understand it … you ‘hear’ the information factually, visually and emotionally” (Neuhauser, 1993, p. 4 as cited in Wall et al., 2019, p. 2). In this way, stories are also often memorable as demonstrated in the following autobiographical note from one of the editors of this book:

Years ago, at a conference a keynote speaker asked everyone in the audience to tell his/her neighbour a story related to the topic of her speech. A fellow academic and I exchanged stories; years later when we two met again, we could not remember each other’s name or affiliation, but we could each remember and retell the story the other person had told us so many years before…

Returning to the pragmatic value of stories, we can employ this memorable quality to further aid content memorisation, as demonstrated in the work of Bower and Clark (1969) who conducted an experiment in which two groups of students were instructed to memorise unrelated words. One group were told simply to study the words, whilst the others were directed to create a narrative/story which included the words. The narrative group recalled six to seven times more than did their control peers. Bower and Clark concluded that ‘thematic organization’ (in the form of a story) was the cause of the narrative group’s comparatively impressive recall ability. You will find many other useful properties of stories demonstrated throughout this book.

Imagery is one aspect of stories which causes them to be memorable. The students in the study cited earlier utilised their imagination to create a story around the words they had been asked to remember. Looking at this another way, it is often the story behind a visual image which gives it its power; otherwise, it may have limited meaning for the observer. The dramatic and heartbreaking images of polar bears wandering their land looking withered and depleted, searching for food, have become a symbol for global warming. Similarly, images of Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, standing next to parliaments around the world, have come to symbolise the need for personal action. Yet whilst such images can have an emotional impact on us, it is arguably the story which accompanies the image that can really move us. Indeed, some would argue it is the story in and through the image that enables transitions and transformations to happen. Even more significantly, once we realise the role which story has in psychology and humanity more broadly, we realise that stories about the world and how we relate to it are literally everywhere around us, every day of our lives. This is both part of the problem (when stories normalise unsustainable behaviours), but also an opportunity, where we can grasp stories to move to new, more sustainable behaviours.

Several authors discuss this idea. Cutanda explores it in “The Secret of Dreaming” chapter wherein stories are presented as cultural devices that perpetuate certain world-views, thus strengthening the case for stories that are attuned to the goals of a just, sustainable and peaceful global society. Barber et al., similarly, make a rallying call for positive future visioning within film in “Examining Sustainability Challenges Using Science-Fiction Film Scenarios”, arguing that students need to “try to imagine the kind of world and future they would really like to see, even if it is not visualized in the movies or television”. In the words of Nanson (“The Future Has Gone Bad; We Need a New One’: Neoliberal Science Fiction and the Writing of Utopian Possibility”), “[i]f publishers think it is impossible to profitably publish new works of utopian SF [science fiction], that does not mean you cannot write them”. Willis (“Reading Ecological Memoirs: What Narrative Therapy Can Tell Us about the Power of Discussing Books in Groups”) discusses narrative therapy techniques wherein clients take part in a ceremony to present new stories about themselves which they have written. Willis argues that this idea is transferable to society at large: “On a social scale, the stories that are being lived in the world today are leading to undesirable futures and so re-storying ourselves and our societies is critical. HE [higher education] has a role to play in this re-storying.”

It perhaps goes without saying that for a story to have power, it needs to be shared. We find a great example of this in “Digitally Enhanced Learning through Collaborative Filmmaking and Storytelling for Sustainable Solutions” (Altekruse and Fischer). Students of the authors’ class presented their films to the Lord Mayor of Darmstadt city; his team was so impressed that they picked up two ideas to implement straight away and kept the others for later. The students also ran practical workshops for other students on how to create short films on mobile phones. These sessions were extremely popular to the testament of the power of the films themselves as well as the value of peer teaching. Altekruse and Fischer comment that they recognised in their students “visible empowerment and the joy of creating something unique that could even have an impact”.

Book structure and overview

We will now give a broad overview of the three main sections in this book before we delve into the detail of what the reader can expect in each chapter. The first chapter in Part I and the final chapter in Part III (we can think of these as bookends!) offer longer stories intended to inspire the reader: to change the world, to transform themselves, to inspire others with stories and perhaps to become a storyteller of the future!

In Part I, we present some of the contemporary scholarship that underpins storytelling as a pedagogical tool for sustainability. Our book begins with a tale designed to introduce us to the role and power of story in contemporary societies; all is not as it first appears! We then explore relationships among stories, beliefs and perspectives and are presented with guidance for how to craft an impactful sustainability story through the ideas and practice of ‘contextual layering’. Our exploration of storytelling practice is deepened further as we take a look at which words and phrases can be used to create high-impact imagery and metaphor in stories to build emotional curiosity. We then explore notions of time within storytelling for sustainability; we first consider the idea of using historical fiction to aid reflection and sense-making before going on to explore stories as ‘systems of imaginative resources’ to envision the future. Part I closes with an examination of contemporary research evid...